xiuzhen idle

English patch is available (look at forum).
THe game is good

At first, it's an interesting cultivation game, although it's not as idle as you'd expect. The problem is that the developers didn't have a clear vision of what they wanted in the game and how to make each system work in a way that complements the other, and each of them ends up losing its usefulness the further you advance.

One example is that, when we reach level 75 of the skills, there's no reason to keep gaining levels, since you can already make all the items.

With each advance, a new function appears. First, you create your sect, recruiting people so that they can gather resources, which you'll use to create items for a part of the endgame.

And the endgame is divided into three parts: one is a tower defense with monsters that you'll train; the other is a tower defense with your character attacking alone. Both use some items created by the sect, but they take a long time to reach a satisfactory level.

The last part of the endgame is the worst. You start creating your own kingdom and it becomes a production game, where you just manage the output of each building to have enough resources, which are used in other buildings that will create other resources. It completely clashes with the first half of the game, without using anything you've done so far.

It's a shame we still don't have a good cultivation game.

This game is definitely pretty 'active'. There are a ton of mechanics to engage with, and until the mid/late game, you can effectively progress in the game while only idling for 10-20 minutes.

There is a TON of content in the game, many mechanics unlock as you progress. Once you ascend past the last realm, there's basically a brand new game that unlocks. 100+ hours in the game, and I've got an entirely new factory logistics micromanagement game to deal with. I absolutely love it. When you progress, it feels very meaningful. Rebirths thematically make sense. I found myself eager to max everything out and reach a point where I'm seeing all the big numbers.

That being said, this game does NOT explain things well. For one, as far as I know, you can only access the tutorials once. This has nothing to do with the translation, they simply are inaccessible more than one time. Moreover, the tutorials do not really properly explain the sheer amount of things you have to interact with. This game would absolutely benefit from just having simple tooltips that explain things. A lot of my gripes with this game revolve around the lack of information and QOL.

You're hit with so much at once, that you can easily make your time MUCH harder for yourself. In general, at least until the mid/late game, if you're idling something for long periods of time, you probably could be doing something more effective to increase your power. However, as you enter the mid game, you start to reach big barriers and at least to me, it wasn't really apparent what I should be doing, other than idling. The abodes, in my opinion, are not explained thoroughly enough and how important they are to the mid game, ESPECIALLY the spirit platform. Spirit stats are a bit obscure, and do not have a well enough explanation for how each modifier affects things, considering how absolutely necessary they are.

And the sect. Oh man. This is, along with the abodes, the most important thing to accelerate your progress. And yet, it is BARELY explained. It is needlessly complex at a glance due to the UI choices, translation, and lack of tutorial. This, like a lot of the mechanics, suffers from being simple once you figure it out. But unless you look up a guide, it's a bunch of numbers and buttons that mean nothing. The rebirth mechanic is also deceptive. I thought that in the mid game, when I reached a wall, I just needed to rebirth more. But I wasn't seeing that much progress, and it took quite a bit of time to reach the same place I did before. But rebirths are truly not that important. On the contrary, I really set myself back by rebirthing so frequently, when in reality, breakthrough items, progress in the sect, and maintaining a high grade were FAR more important. The importance of breakthrough items is explained, but you're not given clear information on exactly how it affects the tribulation.

Beast taming is also a crucial skill in the game that's made needless tedious. You cannot see which level each beast requires to be tamed, until you reach that level, and you roll it on the taming screen. Technically, you could see if it's in the shop, but who knows if you'll even get it in the shop? So you have to write these numbers down if you want any chance of remembering them. There's an auto search feature for rank, but no auto search feature to find a beast. So you have to sit around mindlessly hoping to roll the beast you want, THEN you can AFK and mindlessly hope to roll the grade you want for the beast. It makes 0 sense why you cannot search for a specific beast, other than artificially padding the grind. Even if this feature was gated behind taming them first, why is this not a mechanic? Especially since taming high level beasts is CRUCIAL for the sect, and you will need multiple of them, it is extremely painful.

Everything around beast taming is frustrating. The leveling is abysmally slow. Maxing out beast taming is absolutely worth it, but it's a PAINFUL grind, and the most effective way to level beasts isn't even through taming. You simply need to meet the taming requirements to catch them so you can AFK level them in the sect. It's a bit sad that one of the most prominent skills in the game is so frustrating to deal with. Also, there's 0 warning for this, but if you put a beast in the sect, and then rebirth, you can't even pull that beast out until you're back at the taming level. If you do this, you potentially make things MUCH harder on yourself, since the easiest way to level taming is getting a beast to a high level in the sect so you're able to level that beast with the highest cores, and get the most XP. Trying to level a beast up to that point manually is virtually impossible, because of the insane scaling costs for XP. You simply cannot feasibly farm enough cores to level it up to the breakpoints to reach the next core level. So if you do that, expect to leave your game AFK overnight while you level taming.

Some minor grievances involve the other skills, specifically Alchemy and Forging, which, are somewhat of a waste of time. They take a very long time to level before you get a ton of talent (or talismans), and the payoff isn't that good. New players can get trapped into actually spending time on these skills for minimal gain. That being said, they still have a use in the later game, and can give you boosts in the early game. And it is satisfying being able to create divine level items. Even knowing how minimal the impact is, I still grinded out these skills for the pure satisfaction of creating top level items and pills. Gardening is very useful in the early game to generate money, and in the late game it is required for certain things in the sect. Certain things like longevity are an absolute trap to invest in and should be avoided at all cost, as longevity is a non-issue past the first hour of the game, and is even phased out as a mechanic later on. (Which does make sense thematically)

Talismans should absolutely not have been a DLC. I couldn't imagine playing this game without them. They exponentially speed things up. The proper way to implement these would be locking them behind a certain amount of rebirths, or locking them behind a high realm, perhaps. But unfortunately, it is locked behind $2. Absolutely worth getting if you plan to play this for the long run.

The last unlocked mechanic, the Divine Kingdom, is a factory style, logistics micromanagement game inside the game. At this point, you'll probably be doing the beast array/sect stuff, and most of the stuff in the divine kingdom doesn't take up an action slot, so you can multi task. (Unless you're manually crafting.) It's somewhat fun (so far, I'm early into it), but it suffers from the same lack of QOL features. For example, under your production, you can only see the raw materials you're producing and consuming, so a lot of the micromanagement is just figuring out the numbers yourself, and navigating the UI. I suppose in a different game, this would be intentional design, however, the UI in this game does not hold up enough to make a challenge like this fun. You can also somewhat softlock yourself out of progress, though there is a reset button. The tutorial is acceptable, but is still pretty barebones for the amount of micromanagement you have to be doing. I thought I could scale up my production and have some time before I had to build ships, but in reality, I was on the path to softlocking myself had I not realized that resource timers were quickly running out.

That being said, despite this game being very flawed, I enjoy it a lot. I still have not maxed out the sect or the kingdom, not even close, so I plan on doing that. The game is very addicting and progressing is genuinely fun. Even as I write this, I've got progress ticking in the background. But prepare yourself to comb through the discord, steam guides, and steam discussion section, or have a VERY rough time.